American War

Throughout American War, El Akkad offers a rebuke to the notion that terrorists are predominantly driven by ideology. This notion has grown in popularity over the past three decades with the rise of Islamic terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. For example, the popular political science theory "Clash of Civilizations" posits that the Muslim world is a breeding ground for terror not because of pre-existing conditions of war, poverty, and desperation, but because of something endemic to the ideology of Islam. Samuel Huntington writes, "Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power." (Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1996.)

Again and again, El Akkad challenges this notion. Take the character of Attic, for instance: At the Floordeelee bar with Sarat, Attic makes it known that he doesn't care at all about the Southern cause. When Sarat asks Attic why he fights on her side, he responds, "I wanted to be something. I just wanted to be something" (238). While this may seem far-fetched to some, there are several real-life examples in which everyday ennui, lack of fulfillment, or a desire for fame drive a person to join an insurgency movement. Perhaps the most famous example is that of Cherif Kouachi, one of the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo killings. Kouachi "originally sought to escape his life of petty crime and poverty by becoming a famous rapper. He sought a very western form of fame, and failed, before gaining it by launching an attack on the west." (Manne, Anne. "Narcissism and terrorism: how the personality disorder leads to deadly violence." The Guardian. 8 Jun. 2015).

This theme is revisited a final time when Sarat, while driving down the highway as the war winds down, notices that theirs is the only "fossil car" (277) on the highway: “She remembered the old wartime footage of hollering Southerners on the back of huge fossil trucks, revving their engines in defiance. All that was gone now, and looking at the roads you’d think there never lived a single Southerner who’d ever wanted anything to do with the old fuel that started the war” (278). All of this is enough for Sarat to conclude, “Fuck the South” (313). However, if Sarat no longer believes in the Southern cause, then why does she carry out the attack on Columbus that causing the deaths of 110 million people? One answer is that it reflects the final split between Sarat’s insurrectionist identity and ideological pretense. She does it not to support the Southern cause or any other cause, but simply as a raw expression of her rage at those who caused her and her family so much suffering.

As the war draws to a close, one of the major themes El Akkad explores is the power of narratives to erase or distort military history. In Excerpt 13, Senior Peace Officer David Castro describes the attitude of his Southern counterparts during Reunification talks: “Every day they’d come up with something new they wanted included in the public record—one time it’d be some nonsense about courage in the face of aggression, the next time it’d be about the necessity of self-defense and the protection of the long-cherished ways of living” (279). While his colleagues are happy to oblige with the Southerners attempt to shape peacetime narratives if it means the North fulfills its own strategic goals, Castro better understands the power of those narratives:

I told the President's people if we go along with this, if we nod and smile while they parade some fantasy about this being a noble disagreement between equals, and not a bloody fight over their stubborn commitment to a ruinous fuel, the war will never really be over. But in the end, Columbus went along with it. And even today, all these years later, we live with the consequences. They didn't understand, they just didn't understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories (279).

It is here that El Akkad's Second Civil War most closely resembles the first. In the years following the American Civil War, Southerners worked hard to put forth a revisionist and negationist theory about the roots of the conflict that minimized or outright denied the role slavery played. Instead, they framed the war as a fight to protect their Southern traditions in the face of tyrannical Northern aggression. This came to be known as the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, and it's persisted to varying degrees ever since the war ended. Confederate monuments were erected celebrating the heroism of its combatants and textbooks were rewritten to emphasize "state's rights" as the guiding principle behind the dispute, rather than slavery.

While many historians agree that these narratives aided in the peaceful reunification between Northern and Southern whites, they also minimized or ignored the suffering of former slaves, helping to pave the way for Jim Crow laws and other formal and informal acts of white supremacy in the South. According to historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Neither the trauma of slavery for African Americans nor their heroic, heartbreaking struggle for freedom found a place in that story." (Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. "'You must remember this': Autobiography as social critique." Journal of American History. 1998.)